It Says Organic, So You Ate More of It

I want to start with something slightly embarrassing.

For about two years, before I studied nutrition properly, my kitchen looked immaculate. Organic jaggery instead of sugar. Cold-pressed coconut oil in a beautiful glass jar. Organic peanut butter. Multigrain organic biscuits. No refined sugar granola. Organic honey that cost twice the usual.

And nothing was happening. My energy was flat. My blood work would not move.

I genuinely thought there was something wrong with me. I had removed everything bad and replaced it with the good version. So why was I standing still?

The word was doing something to my hands

This is what I could not see at the time.

When I switched to organic peanut butter, I stopped measuring it. Two spoons became four because it feels light comparatively. Sometimes I ate it standing at the counter, straight from the jar, and did not count that as eating at all.

Same with the granola. A small bowl became a large one. Same with the jaggery, which went into everything, freely, because it was a better substitute.

Nobody told me to do this. I never decided to. The word on the label decided for me.

Once, I wrote down everything I actually ate for a week and saw the peanut butter appear seven times. I still thought, oh, it is healthy, so it doubles the goodness for my health.

Two tablespoons of unsweetened peanut butter is roughly around 190 calories. I was having four, most days, and counting it as nothing. That habit alone was close to 6,000 extra calories a month, from a jar I had bought specifically to be healthier.

This has a name

Psychologists call it the health halo effect.

Some brands decide to put an additional word on a food and brand it as organic, natural, low fat, wholegrain or brown bread, and people quietly serve themselves more of it. People underestimate the calories in these foods and feel less guilty after eating them.

What organic actually means, and what it does not

I am not against organic food, and I want to be clear about that.

Organic is a farming standard. It governs how a crop was grown, which pesticides were permitted, how the soil was treated. Those are real considerations and there are honest reasons to care about them.

But organic does not tell you the calories. Organic sugar and regular sugar are identical to your body.

Of course, a bowl of organic, no refined sugar granola behaves differently from the same bowl of regular granola with additives, but that does not mean you can take more of the no refined sugar granola.

Organic biscuits are still biscuits. Baked chips are still calories.

You may reasonably ask what I do now.

I still buy organic for the vegetables and fruits we eat most often, and for dals and grains. I stopped paying extra for organic packaged snacks entirely. That is where the premium buys you the least.

Where I see this most in Indian kitchens

Jaggery. By far the biggest one. Because it is traditional and unrefined, people use it with a freedom they would never allow white sugar. Jaggery does retain some iron and minerals that refined sugar loses, and that is worth knowing. But it is still roughly two-thirds to four-fifths sucrose, and the amounts most people use erase that benefit several times over.

I had a client in her forties who had cut out white sugar completely and could not understand why her reports were unchanged. After trying that, she felt disappointed by her efforts, so she came for a consultation because she felt that her dieting method had not worked well and she wanted to join a program that might help her reach her goals. During the consultation I asked her to make a note of a week of food that she had, and to include whatever she ate.

We figured out that the jaggery in her coffee and the date sugar in the homemade sweets she turned to when her cravings happened were the reason for the sugar spike. She made them because they were the healthy version, but she also doubled up the quantity along the way, because it is all healthy, right?

So, it came to more sugar than she had been eating before she gave up refined sugar.

Ghee. This one is emotional as well as nutritional. Ghee has a real place in Indian cooking and I have no interest in demonising it. In fact, I would advise my clients to use ghee during their programs. But the quiet shift from a small spoon to a large one, just because it is A2 ghee, adds up faster than anyone expects.

The mistake underneath this

Looking back, I can see what I was actually doing.

I had turned food into a moral system. Good foods and bad foods. And once something landed in the good column, the question of quantity simply vanished from my mind. Good foods felt like they did not count.

That is a comfortable trap, because switching brands is easy. Buying the better version feels like real action. It gives you the satisfaction of having done something without asking you to change how you eat.

Quantity is harder. It asks for attention every day, at every meal, with no receipt at the end of it.

So I did the easy thing for two years and wondered why the hard result never came.

If you are somewhere in those two years right now, I want to say plainly that you have not wasted them. You have built the shopping habits that most people never manage. The instinct was right. Only a few considerations were missing.

What I would tell my earlier self

Read the back, not the front. The front is marketing. The back is information. No sugar granola with twenty grams of sugar substitute per hundred is still a sugary breakfast.

Watch your hand, not the label. This is the single most useful habit I have. When you upgrade a food, keep the portion exactly the same as before. One spoon of oil should stay one spoon when it becomes cold-pressed. The upgrade changes the quality, never the amount.

Ask a better question. Not “is this healthy” but “how much of this, and how often.” That second question is where results actually live.

The part I want you to take away

If you have upgraded your entire kitchen and nothing has changed in how you feel, there is nothing wrong with your body. You have most likely done exactly what I did. You changed the labels and left the portions to look after themselves.

The good news is that this is a far smaller problem than it feels like. You do not have to undo your kitchen. You do not have to give up jaggery or ghee or cold-pressed oil or any of it. You only have to bring back the attention the label quietly took away.

Same shelf. Same jars. Smaller spoon.

That is genuinely most of it.

Dr. Sruthi Ramesh